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Some days ago, we read about Amazon’s latest acquisition, Whole Foods Market, an organic grocery chain. From the perspective of established business, a cross-industry acquisition like this is unexpected and seems somehow strange. From the perspective of Amazon’s goal, becoming “the marketplace for everything”, this acquisition was a logical step. Amazon aims to provide everything that makes life more convenient. This includes services of any kind. Amazon therefore does not limit its business operations on a single industry or market. It aims to cross-connect all services and markets into their business ecosystem. This different strategic perspective makes it easy to think outside of established markets. Then, cross-over innovation becomes the new normal in business operations.

Let’s step back for a moment and look at the fundamental changes brought along by digital markets. Of course, markets have always changed. Today this seems to happen with a global reach at an unprecedented pace and driven by new technology and connectivity. This change perpetually creates new types of business opportunities across domains and industries, with increasing speed and decreasing investment costs. All markets will have to deal with this dynamic sooner or later. We therefore call it the age of hyper-dynamic markets. In these markets, businesses need to look beyond their usual search patterns to find profitable opportunities, they need to do it at scale, and much faster to compete successfully. In addition, the time to profit from a new business opportunity becomes increasingly short: The time frame to identify the opportunity ahead of competitors, the time to “rally the troops”, i.e. to pull together resources and build a business operation dedicated to the new opportunity, and the time to earn money from it might also be much shorter than businesses are used to. Businesses today try very hard to improve innovation and become faster and more flexible in their operations in order to overcome these problems.

But very few get down to the fundamentals of what is really holding them back: They still rely on organizational structures that were built for repetition and stability, and not for cross-over innovation. These structures are not competitive enough when long-term success depends on the ability to pivot a business very fast towards more promising opportunities. Amazon and Chinese company Haier, the world’s leading brand of household appliances, impressively and repeatedly demonstrate this ability. Their success can not only be attributed to strong and visionary leadership, or their high-performance culture. There is something more, that makes these companies so incredible fast, flexible, and able to perform very well across a wide field of vastly different business operations.

It is an organizational structure based on principles of entrepreneurial autonomy and reusable services, largely aligned through digital interfaces. Amazon and Haier work like digital marketplaces of business services for entrepreneurs. Business operations can quickly be set up by combining a customized front-end operation with standardized back-end services. These back-end-services are readily available for any kind of business operation. They offer a comprehensive catalogue of basic services, like accounting, cloud storage, invoicing, payment, or shipping, that every business operation needs. They also offer a lot of specialized and unique services, like e.g. Amazon Wallet, or Haier’s open R&D partnership ecosystem HOPE. Each service in essence provides a high-performing business capability, that can easily be integrated into any kind of business operation. Combined, this business architecture can quickly gain track across a wide spectrum of markets or industries. It can explore much more business opportunities in parallel than traditional businesses. It can scale up profitable business operations much faster. It can very easily establish a system of distributed control and management that is much more efficient than traditional organizational structures.

Amazon and Haier today already provide a glimpse of the future of businesses. We at co-shift expect that businesses who work like a marketplace for entrepreneurs, sharing assets and business capabilities, will dominate markets in the digital age. We think that businesses today should carefully consider their own position: What role will they play in their market 10 years from now? Can they turn themselves into marketplaces for entrepreneurs, ready for innovation at scale?

Most businesses today base their operations on the exploitation of a few well-understood business opportunities. They have optimized their performance to make the most of these opportunities, and defend their turf against competitors in their market. This focus on a single market, a single type of business and a known type of competitors will likely not be sufficient to ensure long-term success. The age of hyper-dynamic markets will bring along competitors from outside of established markets. It will lead to much more innovation. It will lead to products and services that can easily be substituted. It will lead to a much shorter lifecycle of products, business models, and business operations.

The age of hyper-dynamic markets will be brought along by connected products and services, and by businesses that can quickly and deeply connect their operations through digital interfaces. We already observe this happening in some industries. It won’t stop there. All industries will likely be connected through digital interfaces sooner rather than later. This is the time when businesses start to connect operations across industrial domains that until now clearly separate markets and business opportunities from each other.

What does this age of hyper-dynamic, digitally connected markets mean for businesses today? It means that businesses can not rely anymore on a single line of successful operations. This single line of operations will inevitably loose its competitive edge and profitability one day. Hyper-dynamic markets make it impossible to predict when this will happen, reducing the time to adapt to zero. Businesses therefore need to be ready for the end of their money-making operations at any time.

As a way to balance this risk, they need to prepare themselves by building specific capabilities now, while there is still time:

Widening the scope of innovation beyond current branches of business

Easy, early and quick testing of new business opportunities

Partnering and collaboration across industries

Flexible scaling mechanisms according to market demand

This leads towards instant collaboration across established domains, industries and groups of stakeholders. Collaboratively shaping business opportunities into new markets becomes the regular mode of operation in hyper-dynamic markets.

How to do this? We explore breakthrough concepts for this challenge in our book FUTURE LEGENDS – Business in Hyper-Dynamic Markets. Our next post in this series will explain how to turn businesses into marketplaces for crossover innovation and collaboration.